What will run on a 486?

[Moyerman]

Hello, I've got my hands on some freebie 486
DX machines, 16 meg. RAM 200-300 meg. hard drives. They run Winn 3.1 with Microsoft Office fine. I would like to do a clean install with Linux. Are there any distrubitions out there that will work? I would like a GUI with some word processing
and spreadsheets. Everything I'm seeing for
Linux is huge!I downloaded Staroffice and
beleive it's too large. Do I have to compile
my own kernel just for this machine to shrink the code? :confused: :confused:

[FoBoT]

this topic will do better elsewhere, hmmm...
how about "general"

that will be hard, when you said GUI
you could do CLI install, like base debian, then just add a few apps, and not run out of disk space

maybe somebody knows a "GUI" like word processor/spreadsheet that doesn't use X windows ??

[ 13 June 2001: Message edited by: FoBoT ]

[ph34r]

I have a 486sx33 laptop with 4mb of ram - that's right - 4mb. It has a 300mb drive in it. It runs Slackware 7.1, with the base system, network, and console apps package groups installed, and I have about 100mb of free disk space. Pretty wimpy. Royal pain to install. But, good as a second console to ssh into my main box.

Found a 4mb memory upgrade card for it, so it now has 8mb, otherwise same install. Runs like a dream, use it for editing text, doing some text only web browsing (for documentation like LDP), etc. it works great. I still mostly use it as as second console on my main box, but it can easily be used alone. Now I use it as a dhcp/www/ftp server at lan parties.

[fow99]

I think RedHat 6.2 should be OK. I used to use it on a 486DX80. As for office suit, startoffice is huge and sloooooooooow. Don't even think about it on a 486. Try AbiWord and Gnumeric.